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July 18, 2008

Upside Down and Backwards

by Laureen

We're playing with learning to read, but Rowan's not all that interested. He's far more fascinated with learning to write. So we're doing a lot of that. I'm getting used to spelling out my entire grocery list, notes to Jason, pretty much anything I need written down. He's not interested in worksheets or any other formal writing practice; he wants to freeform.

I was a very "classical" learner, and I'm also a reader, while I'm figuring out that Rowan, like his father, is a visual/spatial learner. Knowing this, I don't freak out too much about the fact that Rowan can't read yet (except for words he wants to know, like "SpiderMan" and "YouTube"). I see that he wants to make sure that a letter is the same whether it's written in crayon or in pencil, in chalk or in finger paint, and so we play around with that. He's very interested in the media, more so than the message, and the shapes of the letters seem far more relevant to him than the meaning they're to represent. He's approaching the entire reading/writing learning process in a different way than I did, and it's fascinating to observe.

I spend a lot of time gagging my inner critic. For schoolish me, reading is an end in itself, and all of the side exploration is time wasting. It takes me a lot of deep breaths to not get frustrated, and to truly recognize that the other stuff he's figuring out along the way is every bit as valuable as the actual "reading". I'm a professional editor, but had never figured out that spinning from E to M to 3 to W was fun if you draw the shapes correctly and pivot them on the center point.

The point is to realize that there are many, many fascinating things in this world, and rushing off to the same end result everyone else points to may end up with you missing some of the neatest detours available.

So a few days ago, Rowan decided he wanted to write Kestrel's name out. Carefully aligned in the center of the piece of green construction paper, with his red pen, he wrote out "K... E..."... and a backwards S. Jason pointed out, "Hey, Rowan, you've written the 'S' backwards" and left it at that. (And I'm not even going go into my tirade about how "backwards" is factual information, but most adults in that situation select instead the term "wrong", which comes preloaded with judgment.)

Rowan stared intensely at the page for about a minute. Smiled. Rotated the page, and then drew T...R...E...L... backwards too. So when he was done, Kestrel's whole name was there, in block capitals, in mirror writing.

"Egads!" I thought to myself, "I wonder if that's how Da Vinci got started on mirror writing!"

Quite independently of how excited Jason and I were about him figuring it out, Rowan was very pleased with himself. He explained to me that the shapes worked out, and that was that. I'm still not quite sure what he meant or why the shapes were more pleasing to his eye in mirror-reversal than they were forwards. And in the week or so since, he's kept flipping his words around and playing with the shapes.

And I, who because of my own mental process would accidentally and needlessly limit his in the quest to "teach to read and write", am keeping my mouth firmly shut, and simply enjoying the adventure my learning style never allowed me to take.

Laureen is a writer, a professional editor, a scuba instructor, a beginning sailor, a traveler, and an obsessive researcher who's chiefly focused on, and delighted with, her husband Jason and her sons Rowan and Kestrel. She's a lifelong Californian, which lends a very distinctive spin to both her ideas and her politics, and she's discovered, in her peregrinations, that the world is far smaller yet far more fascinating than anyone gives it credit for being. She holds forth her opinions on that in her blog, The ElementalMom.

Comments

This is really fascinating and to think that he would probably have been labelled dyslexic at school. What a wonderful thing you are doing with him.

I come from an arts background and this media interest in letters makes huge sense to me. Something I will now certainly let my children discover too. Why does it have to be a means to an end after all? It's much more interesting for a child to go off on tangents in different media, seeing things from other points of view.

Good for Rowan, and good for you for letting him go with the flow.
Lune x

I cannot express how much I love this post. Thank you, Laureen. My background--I used to be a public Kindergarten Reading Teacher. Yep, I was the one they sent in to work with the kids doing it all "wrong." AT FIVE!!!! Sheesh! If I had only known then what I know now. It wasn't all bad, mind you. But oh the stories I could tell. At least my children get to benefit from my early mishaps in teaching. Every day they teach me something new. My 4 y/o daughter proudly announced today, "I'm precocious, mommy! That means I like to do what I want to do!" We have no idea where she picked this up--the word OR the definition, but we love it. Sooooo true of all children, ain't it?!

My special ed students learned to read better from their own writing. They wanted to write their own thoughts and not read someone else's so I helped them write. They were so excited about writing that they couldn't wait to read!I think that is why blogs are such a great thing.

I think I blogged about something similar a year ago, or just told a lot of online friends. Last year, Alex was in an art class. They would read a story, then do art projects based on it. His teacher showed me his picture and he had EXACTLY drawn the last page of the book, flipped. Complete mirror image. I thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. I can't draw that well and he can do it backwards? Kids are amazing...they aren't limited by what they see and "know". WTG Rowan!

I don't agree with Ron Davis that kids must be taught and put in special reading programs for dyslexia. But he had a key method for the kids in his reading programs. It involved making the letters in the alphabet in clay and turning them around and around, tactile visual spatial learning. It really is fun that the original choice of letter shapes seems arbitrary to the letter shape newbie.

We turn letters around and around here magnetically on the fridge.

Pretty much all kids go through some phase of dyslexia I bet, some unnoticeably. I don't remember my phase but I'm sure I had one if I thought of it, since I love to mess about with them and see how far I can push the shapes and still make them make sense.

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The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.~John F. Kennedy

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It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power. ~Alan Cohen

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